Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/464

Rh viewing my act in a relatively external way, may pass upon me from without.

It is indeed metaphysically just to assert that in certain aspects of my life I must needs be regarded as a cause, because I am already known to possess conscious significance, and because some aspects of this significance turn out to be causal. But you can never, on the other hand, discover wherein consists my significance by merely asserting that I am somehow or other a powerful cause. And precisely so it is in the case of God. You can indeed say that this or that fact in the world must be viewed as a result of laws whose source lies in the divine nature. But in asserting this you merely lay stress upon a result of that conscious significance which first of all attaches to the Being of all things, and to the life of God in its wholeness.

I cannot, then, too strenuously insist upon the thought that our own theory of Being places the very significance, both of the whole world and of the individual life, in the actual conscious fulfilment of meaning. Such fulfilment, from our own point of view, is the only reality. We therefore do not explain the existence of meaning in the world by looking, in the end, beyond any meaning for the cause which has brought the significant world to pass. To view the matter in that way would be of the very essence of Realism, and would involve all the contradictions which have already led us to reject the realistic interpretation of Being. Causation will find its place in our world, but as a mere result, — a partial aspect, — a mere item of the very significance of that world itself. For causal connections have a place only as expressing